Martin Splitt

★★ Is your SEO audit actually helping you—or wasting resources on irrelevant checks?

The specific aspects of an audit can vary depending on your site. For example, an international site with different language versions should include an hreflang audit, but this makes no sense for a si...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really worry about a spike in 404 errors in Google Search Console?

A high number of 404 errors is normal and expected if you've recently deleted a lot of content. It's not a problem in itself, but a normal consequence. Conversely, an unexplained increase in 404 respo...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are you really leveraging Google Search Console's crawl data to boost your indexation strategy?

The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console allows you to discover how your server interacts with Google's robots and identify potential server interaction problems....

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ What are the technical priorities Google really wants you to audit first?

Aspects to verify during an audit include: routing or network issues, HTTP headers and metadata, redirect chains or loops, canonicalization and internal link issues, as well as markup and rendering pr...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is your SEO audit doomed to fail before you even start?

You must first understand how your site works at the technology level, then use the right tools to identify problems affecting that specific technical foundation, before grouping results based on the ...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is your technical SEO audit actually missing what really matters?

A technical audit must accomplish three things: use tools to identify potential problems, create a report tailored to the specific site to make sense of the data found, then formulate suggestions base...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should a technical SEO audit really go beyond crawlability and indexation?

A technical SEO audit must ensure that no technical issues prevent or interfere with site crawling or indexation. It should use checklists and guidelines, but requires experience to adapt these tools ...

Nov 06, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Avoid Lazy Loading on Above-the-Fold Images to Improve Your SEO?

In a recent episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt warns against using lazy loading for images that are visible as soon as users land on the page: this delays the Largest Contentful Paint (LC...

Aug 26, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★ Why does Google really insist that infinite scroll and lazy loading are fundamentally different?

Infinite scroll and lazy loading are philosophically different: lazy loading loads non-critical resources of an already-defined page, while infinite scroll loads additional content to create an infini...

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Are CSS background images really invisible to Google's search algorithm?

Decorative images loaded via CSS are generally not indexed by Google. Only images that are semantically important to the content (via HTML img tags) are taken into account for indexing....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is lazy loading destroying your image indexation in Google?

If your images aren't being indexed at scale, this may indicate a lazy loading implementation problem. Verify that images appear correctly in the Google Images index to confirm their detection....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is native HTML lazy loading really enough to optimize your page crawl?

Native HTML lazy loading only works for image and iframe elements. To lazy load other content (videos, widgets, comments, API content), custom JavaScript remains necessary....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ What if your LCP is a text block loaded in JavaScript—how does Google actually measure it?

Largest Contentful Paint isn't necessarily an image. A substantial text block loaded late via an API can also constitute the LCP and be impacted by inefficient loading....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does lazy loading really boost your SEO, or just your page speed?

The main SEO impact of lazy loading comes through performance improvement. Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, although their weight is generally minimal except in exceptional cases....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does WordPress's native lazy loading really boost your SEO performance?

WordPress now implements native lazy loading by default for images thanks to a contribution from Felix Arntz, an engineer at Google. This practice has become widespread across modern CMS platforms....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is your lazy loading blocking Google from seeing your images?

To verify that lazy loading works correctly for SEO, use the URL inspection tool in Search Console and examine the rendered HTML. All image URLs must appear in the 'src' attribute of image tags....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is your custom JavaScript lazy loading library sabotaging Google's ability to index your images?

Custom JavaScript libraries that use attributes like 'data-src' instead of 'src' can prevent Google from indexing images. If the 'src' attribute is not properly populated, the image won't be detected ...

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is lazy loading actually killing your LCP?

Lazy loading directly influences Core Web Vitals, particularly the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Poorly implemented lazy loading on visible images delays rendering and degrades measured performance....

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really ban lazy loading from hero images?

Never apply lazy loading to images that are immediately visible (hero image, header). This delays their loading and negatively impacts the Largest Contentful Paint, because the browser cannot preload ...

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is the HTML loading=lazy attribute really enough to prevent indexation issues?

Browsers natively support lazy loading via the 'loading=lazy' attribute for images and iframes. This HTML method is preferable to JavaScript libraries because it is simpler and avoids potential indexa...

Aug 21, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available